Day 11: Studio Ghibli

 Today began slowly, I had tickets to the Ghibli museum at 4 so I didn’t want to go to far and get stuck outside the city. After puttering around the hostel all morning I headed to Kichijoji and Mitaka to wander through the neighborhoods and have some food. 


I first went to this really cute restaurant Hattifnatt. It’s designed to be a child’s version of a restaurant so escape pressures of the world. The front door was child sized and the walls were painted with animals and nature and it was really cute. I ordered an eggplant dish and a praline coffee and a kiwi mango chiffon cake for dessert. It was super delicious. Absolutely lovely. I could go there everyday. I ate my snacks and listened to the re-released Taylor Swift album. Overall a lovely day. 








Next I made my way to Inokashira park and spent the rest of my afternoon wandering through the park people watching and enjoying the beautiful weather. 







I headed over to the Ghibli museum. You aren’t allowed to take pictures inside because in order to encourage people to live in the moment. These tickets are hard to get. I had to buy them a month in advance at 10 am Japan time and waiting in a queue of thousands to get the tickets. Despite the high demand, the cost is only 1000 yen ($6), which is a testament to Miyazaki and the studio.  


Inside was amazing, its mostly about how the films are made and there are old sketches from making the films and the place is defined to look like the studio in some rooms. There are paintings on clear film placed over the hand painted backgrounds. It’s truly gorgeous. I got to watch a short wordless film, about 15 minutes, about a couple of boys (well ones a rabbit) but they meet and play together and it was really sweet and funny. They had a room on some unmade films where they showed the story boards and characters. Lots of figurines of the different movies. It was overall just really neat. I spend a couple hours and it was really great. 










I walked back to the train station and headed to rest a bit before meeting up with a couple other travels in Shinjuku for dinner. It was nice, they were from Germany and Canada, and we laughed and talked about our travels and differences between our countries and it was a good night. 


Around midnight I was ready to head back, and I was like “oh when do the trains stop” and one of the girls goes “around midnight” and I freaked. I was like “it’s after midnight now” and she’s like “ah no” and I’m like “we leave now”. I was miles from my hostel still and they weren’t at the same hostel as me do I’d have to get there alone. Luckily, the hostels were still open, so it wasn’t an issue, but man I was stressed for 15 minutes or so haha. I finally made it back to my hostel and promptly passed out. 

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